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School architecture is often taken for granted both in use (where it is naturalized) and in writing on education policy (tending to feature simply as policy setting.) Built policy instead points up the active and ongoing role of the material environment in shaping education. From financing and procurement to the design of individual classrooms, the paper works across architecture, sociology and policy studies to clarify the relationship between different dimensions of physical and social space and so provide a useful theoretical ground for future work. What is special about school-building and architecture that enables them to do policy? How are they used to do it? By whom? From city planners to students, a range of actors use different space-organizing resources to attempt the instantiation of (and challenges to) policy in built form. These processes are explored first theoretically, then empirically through a new Academy school in England. The paper deepens understanding of what policy is, emphasizing its intimate if taken for granted spatial characteristics, its ongoing-ness in built form and its travel by means of circulating images of buildings and spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Test-based accountability or 'TBA,' as a core element of the pervasive Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), has become a central characteristic of education systems around the world. TBA often comes in conjunction with greater school autonomy, enabling governments to assess 'school quality' (i.e. test results) from a distance. Often, quality improvement is further encouraged through the publication of these results. Research has investigated this phenomenon and its effects, much of it focusing on Anglo-Saxon cases. This paper, drawing on expert interviews and key policy documents, couples a policy borrowing with a policy instruments approach to critically examine how and why TBA has developed in the highly autonomous Dutch system. It finds that TBA evolved incrementally, advancing towards higher stakes for schools and boards. Further, it argues that school autonomy has been central to the development of TBA in two ways. Firstly, following a period of decentralisation that increased school(board) autonomy, the Dutch government saw a need to strengthen accountability to ensure education quality. This was influenced by international discourse and accelerated by a (politically exploited) national 'quality crisis' in education. Secondly, the traditionally autonomous Dutch system, shaped by 'Freedom of Education', has at times conflicted with TBA, and has played a significant role in (re)shaping global policy and in mitigating the GERM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the strong policy push to improve students' results on national literacy and numeracy tests - the National Assessment Program, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) - in the Australian state of Queensland influenced schooling practices, including teachers' learning. The paper argues the focus upon improved test scores on NAPLAN within schools was the result of sustained policy pressure for increased attention to such foci at national and state levels, and a broader political context in which rapid improvement in test results was considered imperative. However, implementation, (or what this paper describes more accurately as 'enactment') of the policy also revealed NAPLAN as providing evidence of students' learning, as useful for grouping students to help improve their literacy and numeracy capabilities, and as a stimulus for teacher professional development. Drawing upon the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, the paper argues that even as more political concerns about comparing NAPLAN results with other states were recognised by educators, the field of schooling practices was characterised by a logic of active appropriation of political concerns about improved test scores by teachers, for more educative purposes. In this way, policy enactment in schools is characterised by competing interests, and involving not just interpretation, translation and critique but active appropriation of political concerns by teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use the development of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (APST) as an illustrative case to examine how national schooling reforms are assembled in Australia’s federal system. Drawing upon an emerging body of research on ‘policy assemblage’ within the fields of policy sociology, anthropology and critical geography, we focus on interactions between three dominant ‘component parts’ in the development of the APST: the Australian federal government; New South Wales state government agencies; and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. While policies like the APST claim to be national in form and scope, our analysis suggests ‘the national’ is much more disjunctive and nebulous, constituted by a heterogeneous and emergent assemblage of policy ideas, practices, actors and organisations, which often reflecttransnationaltraits and impulses. We thus see national reforms such as the APST as having a phantom-like nature, which poses challenges for researchers seeking to understand the making of national policies in federal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers unique insights into the relationship between education policy and teachers' work. It considers how globally pervasive responsibilising regimes make teachers' work more burdensome. Drawing on interviews with 15 school teachers, this article shows how China's 2021 Double Burden Reduction Policy has reconfigured educators' (class)work practices and pedagogical approaches. Specifically, it unpacks the policy mechanisms that: 1) condense school time and make teachers' work more methodical and 2) prolong teachers' working hours that are dedicated to offering students after-school educational support, thus reducing the demand for shadow education. This article argues that this policy shifts the education burden away from tutorial enterprises and parents and onto the teachers, which illustrates a case of the impact of policy regimes on teachers' work within the broader context of neoliberal globalisation. Moreover, this article produces a novel typological spectrum – submission, substantiation, and scepticism – to capture and understand the diverse ways in which teachers may respond to policy-led changes to their professional work globally. Overall, it generates new knowledge on the impact of homogenising education policies on teachers' work and the heterogeneity of teachers' responses to these policies, thus contributing conceptually to the wider field of policy sociology in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While numbers, data and statistics have been part of the bureaucracy since the emergence of the nation state, the paper argues that the governance turn has seen the enhancement of the significance of numbers in policy. The policy as numbers phenomenon is exemplified through two Australian cases in education policy, linked to the national schooling reform agenda. The first case deals with the category of students called Language Backgrounds Other than English (LBOTE) in Australian schooling policy – students with LBOTE. The second deals with the ‘closing the gap’ approach to Indigenous schooling. The LBOTE case demonstrates an attempt at recognition, but one that fails to create a category useful for policy-makers and teachers in relation to the language needs of Australian students. The Indigenous case of policy misrecognition confirms Gillborn’s analysis of gap talk and its effects; a focus on closing the gap, as with the new politics of recognition, elides structural inequalities and the historical effects of colonisation. With this case, there is a misrecognition that denies Indigenous knowledges, epistemologies and cultural rights. The contribution of the paper to policy sociology is twofold: first in showing how ostensive politics of recognition can work as misrecognition with the potential to deny redistribution and secondly that we need to be aware of the socially constructed nature of categories that underpin contemporary policy as numbers and evidence-based policy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper builds upon an earlier analysis presented in this journal. Using official figures for school compositions and for outcomes at KS4 from 1997 to 2007, this paper considers each of the annual cohorts of new Academies in England, from 2002 to 2006. It shows that their level of success in comparison to their predecessors, national averages, their changing compositions and their changing exam entry practices are insubstantial. Of course some schools are gaining higher scores since Academisation, but others are gaining lower scores. Using the most recent results available there is no clear evidence that Academies produce better results than local authority schools with equivalent intakes. The Academies programme therefore presents an opportunity cost for no apparent gain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Bourdieu to develop theorizing about policy processes in education and to extend the policy cycle approach in a time of globalization. Use is made of Bourdieu’s concept of social field and the argument is sustained that in the context of globalization the field of educational policy has reduced autonomy, with enhanced cross‐field effects in educational policy production, particularly from the fields of the economy and journalism. Given the social rather than geographical character of Bourdieu’s concept of social fields, it is also argued that the concept can be, and indeed has to be, stretched beyond the nation to take account of the emergent global policy field in education. Utilizing Bourdieu’s late work on the globalization of the economy through neo‐liberal politics, we argue that a non‐reified account of the emergent global educational policy field can be provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1980s, state schools in England have been required to ensure transparency and accountability through the use of indicators and templates derived from the private sector and, more recently, globally circulating discourses of ‘good governance’ (an appeal to professional standards, technical expertise, and performance evaluation as mechanisms for improving public service delivery). The rise of academies and free schools (‘state-funded independent schools’) has increased demand for good governance, notably as a means by which to discipline schools,in particular school governors– those tasked with the legal responsibility of holding senior leadership to account for the financial and educational performance of schools. A condition and effect of school autonomy, therefore, is increased monitoring and surveillance of all school governing bodies. In this paper, I demonstrate how these twin processes combine to produce a new modality of state power and intervention; a dominant or organizing principle by which government steer the performance of governors through disciplinary tools of professionalization and inspection, with the aim of achieving the ‘control of control’. To explain these trends, I explore how various established and emerging school governing bodies are (re)constituting themselves to meet demands for good governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In an increasingly competitive environment that positions students as consumers, universities have become ever more marketised, responding to policy contexts that foreground value for money, consumer choice and competition. The intensity of marketisation is argued to have profoundly affected the nature of academic work and scholars themselves, recreating academics as commodities to be weighed and measured, becoming corporatised, alienated and inauthentic in their practice. Yet with the majority of accounts of the commodification of higher education focusing on students, the actual process of how academics become consumed is under-theorised. This article therefore begins with a discussion of the historical context, providing evidence of the familiar indices of marketisation such as rampant self-promotion, the scramble for external funding and intense competition. It argues that this commodified DNA of the university provides the context for the seduction of the modern academic within the consumer society, a movement from the gratification of needs to the perpetual frustration of desires through the 'Diderot Effect' of policy shifts. It concludes with an examination of how contemporary academic work can be viewed through the lens of consumerism and how academics themselves have become consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the proliferation of choice policies in education, parents are increasingly positioned as 'consumers' tasked with choosing the 'best' school for their children. Yet a large body of research has shown that the process of selecting a school is far more complicated than policy-makers and researchers often predict. This article uses ethnographic data on middle-class parents in a large city who are considering sending their children to a diverse neighborhood public school to further develop our understanding of school choice. Drawing from sociological research on consumption as a social and cultural process, we examine the intersections between parents' choice of a particular school (i.e. consumption) and their own identity construction. Our data show that the act of choosing a school can become, for parents, a means of expressing and enacting a particular identity. In this case, the intersections between identity and choice pushed many parents - invested in seeing themselves as liberal urbanites - towards an urban public school. We suggest that similar dynamics could have different outcomes for other groups of parents and that the symbolic nature of the school choice decision has broader relevance and merits further study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many countries choice of school is an increasing concern for families and governments. In Spain and Chile, it is also associated with a long-standing political cleavage on the regulation of large sectors of private-dependent schools. This article analyses both the micro- and the macro-politics of choice in these two countries, where low-status 15-year-old students record a significant segregation. At the micro level, some evidence is provided that not only middle-class skilful choosers but also the political representatives of private-dependent schools manage to pursue their interests drawing on economic, social and cultural capital. At the macro level, evidence also shows that the lobbies defending private-dependent schools can use and maintain these power resources. However, in some episodes collective action is an effective power resource for those who campaign in favour of a stricter regulation of these schools, but its influence is much difficult to maintain for longer periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talk of the rise of a global war for talent and emergence of a new global meritocracy has spread from the literature on human resource management to shape nation-state discourse on managed migration and immigration reform. This article examines the implications that the global war for talent have for education policy. Given that this talent war is a product of neoliberalism, it raises many of the same concerns for educators as neoliberalism in general: the embrace and promotion of social, economic and educational inequality; and a narrow, market-based conception of education, skill and talent. This article argues, however, that the global war for talent represents a new phase in neoliberalism, as it seeks to liberalise the global movement not just of capital and commodities, but of high skill labour as well. In this, it threatens to undercut some of the founding assumptions and goals that have shaped national education policy in OECD countries throughout the post-World War II period, and raises serious concerns for how we are to think about and pursue equality, inclusion and fairness in and through education in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]